The Junction


Archive for December, 2007

We racked our brains this week trying to figure out why some people had smooth sailing and others had a typhoon. Or why some bug reports were simply great finds while others made no sense. Anyway, while we’re hard at work on the ones that we CAN replicate and fix, Stephen walks around the corner and decides to have a moment of brilliance. He *reckons* the problem is ‘xyz’ and then he disappears again. And sure enough he’s right. Grrr, he does that sometimes.

Well a late night, a lot of coffee and a few shorter fingernails later, and the dev team have come up with a few ways to help stop ‘xyz’ happening.

So just boot PJ Remix while you’re online to enjoy 1.01b today. With over 40 bug tickets resolved this should be a ‘safer ride’. But remember, if you’ve created albums that have had issues along the way, then the data for those particular products could still be troublesome, even using the more robust 1.01b.

Cheers
Danny

Today or tomorrow we will upload the second Remix update in two weeks that consists almost entirely of “bug fixes”. Some of our users would like to know why this is necessary, even if Remix is still “beta software”. It’s a fair question.

Before we answer, bear in mind that we act on your bugs and suggestions really quickly. That’s why we release updates every week, and any deal-breakers you uncover go straight to the head of the line.

So here goes (and sorry for the length) …

We believe professional photography as a whole is well supported by great software, starting with Photoshop.

But that’s NOT true of specialty software for the portrait and wedding sector.

There are maybe a hundred thousand photographers across North America, the UK, Ireland and Australasia. That would be a small market for a major application even if everybody got in behind it, which they haven’t! Instead we have a software vacuum that has been filled largely by well meaning but under-resourced IT enthusiasts writing software as a sideline, and individual vendors producing solutions to their own workflow problems as best they can.

We believe that’s a second-rate solution.

Our goal is to build an outstanding application, powerful enough to deliver to all wedding and portrait photographers, and their vendors, a professional solution to their image processing needs.

An example of our “path to release” is Parallels (which allows users to run Windows on Intel Macs). Parallels was released in beta form at reduced prices, as we are doing, and the program evolved through several releases before going to “final”. It was thanks to the beta testers that a great program was developed. I know. I use it, and I was a beta tester.

But here’s an interesting point. If PJ Remix ends up with as many users as Parallels had while it was still in beta, we would be very happy. What does that mean? At any given step along the way there are likely to be more bugs “as yet undiscovered”, simply because software evolves and consolidates as more users explore and use it. We wish it wasn’t so!

There is no law saying you have use beta software, or suffer its occasional frustrations, and that’s why we are so grateful to those who do it anyway!

Happy holidays – from Ian and all the PJ Team

Wow, what happened? We’ve been buzzing around like flies in a bottle since our special offer went up. As you’d expect, it’s generated lots of questions, lots of traffic on the forums. I got back from the States on an early morning flight this morning and found Danny already at work and looking a leetle spaced out – he made the mistake of going on line before bedtime and was still there posting at 1.30 in the morning. And IanC thought he’d take a peek at home before he had his breakfast, so he was limbered up too by the time he got to work! Just so you know, we’re on the case. Keep those letters and bugs rolling in, as Dean Martin used to say. Sort of.

Cheers – Ian

When you log on to the forum, why not make it a habit to click “View New Posts”? If you see a question you can answer, type a quick response. There comes a magic moment in the best software when users start to dialogue amongst themselves – build a community. Trust us, that won’t lessen our commitment, but it will speed up the response, and build real depth in the application itself. Not only that, reading other people’s posts will increase your level of understanding for sure.

PS The forum search feature is working much better now. Why not give it a try?

We have come to a great milestone in our project, PJ Remix. Today we’re releasing v1.0.

And to launch in style we are offering a 48 hour Half Price Special

Here are a few fun facts about PJ Remix 1.0 Beta:

- 819 Files compile to make one executable application.
- Although we’ve released v1.0 today, there have been over 2500 internal revisions.
- The original name for this project was “PJ Jr”.
- An estimated 15,000 hours have gone into PJ Remix ( plus beta testing, thank you people!!).
- Over 700 reported issues resolved through our feedback tracking system
- Over 17m words in ‘code’ ( tough to get a line count ).

We live in the real world. We are releasing v1.0 as a beta knowing there are plenty of fixes and features to come, but don’t get us wrong – this thing is amazing.

If you are new to PJ Remix download from http://www.photojunction.com/download.html

To get the special offer register from inside PJ Remix.

Two things remain to be said:

1. Thank you, thank you, thank you to our beta testers. We owe you a lot.

2. Tell your friends so they don’t miss out on the special!

Have Fun,
Danny

We’ve just released another version of PJ Remix, 0.96.

Along with 24 bug fixes we’ve managed to put in a lot of time on templates, so much so that we wanted to have a little fun…

Does PJ Remix have the best templates because…

10) PJ Remix can sort templates into your own collections.
9) PJ Remix can scale your thumbnails of the templates, same as your images
8) PJ Remix can preview templates full screen with a good quality preview of the layout.
7) PJ Remix exports a template collection in 2 clicks.
6) PJ Remix can import templates from PJ Retro (you need the PJ Retro Template Exporter).
5) PJ Remix can filter templates by the number of apertures on the layout (and many other attributes).
4) PJ Remix automatically saves ALL your design work into templates.
3) PJ Remix can share templates from within PJ Remix straight to a friends email address (try this feature out!)
2) PJ Remix can drop a template as a group of apertures (ie the aperture sizes and spacing are treated as absolute).
1) PJ Remix templates will fit in any size album no matter what they were created on.

Did I get the order of these wrong? Miss one out?

CAUTION: My purpose here is to give you an idea of the possibilities of the template function, and encourage you to play with it, but this is very new code. eg I just spoke to someone who couldn’t use the Share Templates button. I can’t replicate this, but play cautiously for now. Another thing, if you have existing templates you’ll need to save the album again to create images in the templates. Finally, sorry about the image quality for PJ Retro imports, but the Retro images are fairly small to begin with.

Hi All

Team PJ always has something on the go…

On Monday a BBQ Fundraiser was held by our long time friends at GRINZ http://www.grinz.co.nz/ to support “Movember Prostate Awareness“. GRINZ is a Kiwi mailing list for photographers. It looked like a few laughs and a lot of fun, wish we could have been there!

To help the cause we offered for auction the very first Remix media pack signed by Team PJ.

pjremix
“eager GRINZers clamour for the “first off the press” much lauded PJRemix disc”
- photo by moi, Simon at the Bay

C’mon lads, take care of yourselves – go get a check up ;-)

Cheers
Danny

I spent my lunch hour reading a forum post (not here obviously!) about “the best album template software”. I guess I may be preaching to the choir, but…

1. Are “clunky” and/or “badly supported” the most common descriptors for album planning software? (We know Remix is “v1.0″ right now, but check out our forums – we’re committed!)

2. So, why not design your albums in Photoshop? It’s exceptional software, but even Adobe doesn’t suggest that’s a good idea. Adobe’s layout software is InDesign, part of Creative Suite. Another great application – we use both ourselves.

3. But what does InDesign know about wedding and portrait photographers, their albums and their suppliers? Not enough. For example you’ll look in vain for template functionality in InDesign. Just as important, photographers have very specific sales and presentation needs, and they design books, not sheets of paper. If you’re not sure what I’m driving at, click here or check our feature list.

4. Almost all “album planning software” assumes the book is flushmount (un-matted). Yes, digital albums can be gorgeous – but isn’t everybody doing them now? How are YOU going to differentiate as the price they command declines?

5. So how many album-planning applications can handle customisable matted albums? Three that I know of. And how many are NOT tied to a single vendor? One.

PJ’s business case in five easy questions…

Cheers, Ian